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Amazon business Case Studies

Case Studies: Three Benefits of Automated Performance Optimization

If you go looking for case studies that prove the business value of improving website performance, chances are you’ll encounter a number of studies that focus on obvious ecommerce metrics like cart size and sales. But there are a number of other ways that improving performance can move other business metrics. Today, I want to highlight a few of these metrics using some customer case studies.

Ecommerce Revenue

Since this is the first thing most people ask about, we’ll look at this one first. Proving the benefit of performance on an ecommerce site is a relatively straightforward endeavour through simple A/B testing. This is what we did for AutoAnything.com. CTO Parag Patel knew that his pages were much slower than they should be — with the home page sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to load — but he needed us to prove the ROI for our solution.

First, we demonstrated that FastView could cut page load times in half. Then we conducted an A/B test, serving half of AutoAnything’s traffic the accelerated version of the site and the other half the unaccelerated version. After the trial, we found that the accelerated site moved the numbers on three ecommerce metrics:

As I mentioned at the top of this post, ecommerce revenue may be the most obvious metric, but there are other areas where page acceleration can move the needle…

Improved Productivity

At health and wellness ecommerce pioneer LuckyVitamin.com, speed governs every aspect of their business, from the online experience to order fulfilment and shipping. Before implementing FastView, the team at LuckyVitamin.com had spent several years manually optimizing their web pages, and they were very aware of the connection between faster pages, increased revenue, and happier customers. The issue for LuckyVitamin.com was finding a long-term solution that could take over the gruelling labour of manual performance tuning.

Sam Wolf, president of LuckyVitamin.com, told us:

“We’re not an Amazon or a Facebook, who have entire elite teams of developers who specialize in front-end optimization. But with FastView, we could get the same advanced expertise and insight that Amazon and Facebook have, via a product.”

For LuckyVitamin.com, the payoff isn’t just revenue gains, it’s also internal productivity gains. According to Wolf, “We’ve seen about a 10% increase in employee productivity. Now that performance tuning is no longer part of our developers’ workload, they can get back to concentrating on feature development.”

Network and CDN Cost Savings

Revenue and productivity gains are extremely compelling arguments for performance automation. A third gain — and one that frequently comes as a pleasant surprise — is the savings in network and CDN costs.

Source: blog.radware.com

The Case Study Handbook: How to Read, Discuss, and Write Persuasively About CasesBook (Harvard Business Review Press)

Chevron Runs from Judgment

by RuffJustice

And you thought BP was ethically challenged?...
by Greg Palast
Chevron is attempting to slither out of an $8 billion judgment rendered yesterday by a trial court in Ecuador for cancer deaths, illnesses and destruction caused by its Texaco unit.
They didn't lose their shrimp boats; they lost their kids. Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan Natives of the Amazon, said about his three-year-old. "He went swimming, then began vomiting blood." Then he died.
Texaco lawyer Rodrigo Perez, showed the epidemiological studies tracing childhood cancers to their oil, sneered and said, "And its the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States, in Europe, in Quito? If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by the petroleum industry

Report: IBM Named #1 Preferred Provider of IaaS Cloud by Enterprises — Virtual-Strategy Magazine Ultimately, the report states, players competing in the cloud services market will need to build to the end-state structure of a cloud service provider business model that resembles the automotive factory model of services delivery involving a robust ..

Reframing the fiduciary debate — BenefitsProRhoades proposes we reframe the argument by shifting the focus from the service provider's business model to the clients' best interests. Furthermore, he suggests we move the venue from the offices of regulators to the kitchen tables of clients.

Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in ConsultingBook (Innovation Press)